Welcome to Stats Tools

This Statistics Tools website was designed to go with the Statistics Help Desk at Missouri State University. Maintained by Dr. Erin Buchanan and her team of graduate students, it ties together all of the resources listed below into one convenient location.

Invader Sim is a blog to keep current on the inner workings of the Statistics Help Desk, Dr. B’s research adventures, and general comments on the state of data science in psychology. The blog features posts on new videos, new materials, commentary on popular interpretation of science in the media, and updates on research coming through the lab. Former students and colleagues contribute to the blog, and you can find their information on our about page.

This page contains materials from Dr. B’s courses (basic/advanced/graduate statistics and structural equation modeling) and these materials provided with multiple formats (SPSS, Excel, R, VassarStats, JASP/Jamovi) for use by students in her courses and the interested graduate student or researcher. This information is formatted so that an individual may download the entire course for a template when assigned as a course prep.

This certificate is coordinated by Dr. Buchanan, who works with students to ensure that they complete the requirements in a way that matches their long-term goals. Certificate requirements include one graduate statistics course, one research methods course, and two other electives in statistics or research based courses. Click the link to learn more about the program.

The Psychology Help Desk was designed as small group tutoring/help opportunity for our statistics and research methods courses (approximately 1,500 students annually). The Help Desk holds regular open hours to accommodate students who need assistance with program or math related questions. The online Help Desk was created to reach our busy, non-traditional, and online students. Dr. Buchanan supervises the graduate assistant and practicum students who hold open hours. The graduate assistant answers a special email box for the Help Desk and provides assistance through a special Blackboard portal. The Blackboard site is used to link students to appropriate materials, contact information for the Help Desk, and email out information as necessary. If you are a student at Missouri State University and enrolled in one of our target courses, you will be automatically enrolled in the Blackboard course. Contact us at psyhelp@missouristate.edu or through our Facebook page if you have questions and are not enrolled in one of these courses.

After testing the online features of Blackboard (Collaborate), we discovered that students were not likely to use them to connect to the online help features. Therefore, we set up a Facebook page for our Psychology Help Desk (started Fall 2015). We answer questions online for students and other individuals.

The YouTube channel contains many hours of tutorials on how to complete statistical procedures in SPSS, Excel, R, MOTE, and G*Power. This information is used as teaching material in Dr. Buchanan’s courses and is open access for students/researchers to use as needed. She responds to online questions about these materials and take requests for video material.

MOTE was originally a free JAVA based program that calculated effect sizes and their non-centralized confidence intervals. This program was designed to fill the gap between running hypothesis testing calculations and effect sizes for students in a simple format – while also adding in confidence intervals for effect sizes because of the promotion for these values in reporting. MOTE is now an R script that is available on github for importing into R. We are working on updating MOTE to submit to CRAN, as well as creating an online interface for the website for non-R researchers.